“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which…[Read more]

Uniting literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and a deeply archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court freshly examines how literature reflects and constructs the dynamics of emotional life in the Renaissance courtly sphere. Spanning the 16th century — with chapters on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey…[Read more]

In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

The friends, followers, and fans of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, made no small contribution to the world of early modern English letters. This essay contributes to our growing understanding of the Essex circle’s literary afterlife by contextualizing BL Additional MS 18638, an early seventeenth-century manuscript containing a partial English…[Read more]

In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the dramatic function of Thomas of Woodstock (King Richard’s murdered uncle) has long been a source of contention and confusion. This essay argues that Woodstock’s role in the play cannot be understood without reference to Richard II’s “prehistory”: the complex series of political circumstances and events that predat…[Read more]

Though it is a critical commonplace that English revenge tragedy began with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, there has been little systematic discussion of how revenge fared as a dramatic theme before Kyd’s inaugural work. This essay reexamines the importance of revenge in early Elizabethan drama, by broadly surveying its thematic and rhe…[Read more]

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage…[Read more]

A focus on Launcelot Gobbo as middleman and unfaithful servant enables an expanded reading of discourses of economics in The Merchant of Venice. In addition to the mercantile modes of Antonio and Shylock, the play also includes a transactional perspective in Launcelot as well as Portia’s fantasy of cornucopia. The chapter is part of Linda…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of…[Read more]

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated ‘Shakespeare’ constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.

Using REED London as a case study of how we, as pre-modern performance and theatre historians, are using digital methods to aggregate its materials, access and analyze a remarkably broad array of archival documents, and amplify their importance to a broader spectrum of humanities scholars and potential collaborators than we cannot have been able…[Read more]

A how-to lesson on working with Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, focusing both on the basics of searching and navigating interfaces and on thinking about remediation on how EEBO and ECCO represent material texts. Presented originally at Edinburgh’s “Beyond the Black Box” series in May 2017.

One of the most familiar literary topics is the seduction scene. Both Shakespeare and Milton enhance this tradition by shifting the motives offered by the seducer to ones fitting increasingly autonomous and ambitious women, foreshadowing many of the concerns of modern feminism.

The next election for this forum’s representative in the Delegate Assembly will be held in the fall of 2017, and the forum’s executive committee will take up the matter of nominations for this election when it meets during the January 2017 convention in Philadelphia. Though the executive committee is responsible for making nominations, it is req…[Read more]

Please join us at MLA 2017 for the International Spenser Society’s Hugh MacLean Memorial Lecture, to be given by Prof. Anne Coldiron (Florida State University), on ‘Spenser and the Resources of Translation’. The lecture takes place during the International Spenser Society luncheon, to be held at…[Read more]

This summer (July, 2017), Richard Strier is directing an NEH seminar on King Lear — text, sources, criticism, afterlife, etc. — at the U of Chicago. All interested tenured, tenure-track, and full-time non-tenure-track instructors at colleges and universities are invited to apply. The 16 accepted applicants will receive a stipend to attend t…[Read more]